A PARENTHESIS OF HISTORY
HIKMET BILA

Turkish Press
May 26 2009

VATAN- A statement made by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was
considered an ‘opening’ again. The media immediately underlined
his statement about the mined lands, when he said that people from
different ethnical identities have been expelled from our countries,
which was actually the result of a fascistic approach. Of course,
this statement is nice in the light of modern approach, which is
based on the belief that all the citizens of a country are equal,
regardless of their ethnical and religious origin. This statement
is particularly favorable for those who want to bring the issue of
‘minorities’ on the agenda again and again in Turkey, but it is against
the logic of history to interpret, praise or criticize the historical
incidents with only one or two sentences. When Erdogan said that we
had expelled those from different ethnical identities, he should have
clarified who have been expelled – were they Armenians, Jewish or Greek
people with Turkish citizenship – and when and how they were expelled.

Let’s open a parenthesis of history. The Large Scale Attack which was
won in August 26-30, 1922 ended, when the Turkish armies entered Izmir
in September 9. It wasn’t a secret that during the Greek invasion
of Western Anatolia and Eastern Thrace and the ally invasion of
Istanbul (including Greece), most of the Greek minority with Turkish
citizenship made cooperation with occupiers (and even got involved
in massacres). Now it wouldn’t have been incomprehensible for them
to leave the Turkish territory with the defeated Greek army. As a
matter of fact, thousands of Greek people with Turkish citizenship,
mostly from the Western Anatolia, the Black Sea Region and Eastern
Thrace, migrated to the Greek territory on ships, trains and other
vehicles that they could have found in that era.

Some other Greek people with Turkish citizenship left Turkey, as
required by the Treaty of Lausanne. This was a decision made by
the conference upon a suggestion by the Norwegian delegation in the
first stage of Lausanne talks. The mutual compulsory migration has
started as from 1923, as required by this decision envisaging the
‘interchange’ between the Orthodox Greek people outside Istanbul and
Muslim Turks outside the Western Thrace. Greek people mostly from
the Central Anatolia were sent to Greece, and the Turkish people in
Greece predominantly from rural areas were sent to Turkey.

The migrations have never been favorable. Of course, it’s not good
to expel the people and oblige them to settle in the places that
they don’t know, but it would be unfair to define the migrations
which occurred under the war conditions and by some international
agreements after 1922 and 1923 as fascist in a way to bring Hitler
to mind. The dramas suffered by the two sides due to these obligatory
migrations have been the subject of innumerous books, researches and
literary products. But even these sorrows don’t give anybody the right
to erase the historical facts and convict only ‘one side’ of those
‘who have made history’ with only one sentence.

Such evaluations which are away from historical facts can be remembered
as the words which sound good, and even create political results,
but they wouldn’t be compatible with the truth. There are innumerous
academic works which can build such concepts as ‘immigration,’
‘interchange,’ ‘miorities,’ ‘expelling’ or ‘being expelled’ on a
firm ground in the history of Turkey and the world and it’s not so
difficult to resort to them.